IAEA Prepares to Send Safety, Security Teams to Ukrainian Nuclear Stations

Officials from Ukraine and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have agreed that nuclear safety and security experts will be stationed at all of Ukraine's nuclear power plants as part of an effort to avert a war zone disaster.

"This is particularly important at a time when Ukraine's energy infrastructure is facing unprecedented challenges as a result of the war and in the middle of winter," the agency's director general, Rafael Grossi, said after talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal on the sidelines of a donors' conference in Paris.

The IAEA officials had already been at a plant in Zaporizhia for several months, trying to preserve a facility that has been regularly bombed because it is close to the front lines of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

There were also frequent visits to three other reactors, Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, and southern Ukraine, as well as to the site of the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear accident. Under the new plan, this would turn into a permanent presence.